Oxytocin?
You folks rule.
I saw Titanic out of a misplaced sense of civic duty to Hollywood. After hearing how much money was spent on the damned thing, I thought it would bankrupt two studios (Paramount and 20th Century Fox), and between its length limiting the number of screenings every theater could hold each day, and its truly meh love story, I thought it would end up a bigger box office bomb than Ishtar and Cleopatra and Heaven’s Gate put together. After seeing it I thought most of the spectacle was an eyeful, but I certainly didn’t think anyone would bother seeing it twice.
You could have knocked me down with a feather when it started breaking box office records, and staying in theaters for months on end.
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I never saw Titanic, and I’m not really planning to. I already kinda know how it ends. shrug
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It’s not terrible. And it’s 1000× better than Avatar.
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I worked with a woman who would burst into ugly sobs everytime that damn song came on the radio. Which it did like a dozen times a day because it was such a giant hit. /gag
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If I never hear that song again, it’s still too soon. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go wash my brain out with steel wool now.
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Dunno about that. It’s kinda terrible, and easily an hour longer than I’d have liked it to be.
There’s one thing it has in common with Avatar: if you don’t see it on a very big screen to get the spectacle into your eyes, it’s really not worth the bother. If someone made me choose which of them to rewatch, I’d have a tough time deciding which one would be a more tolerable waste of my time.
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Avatar was a visual treat in 3D, but plot-wise it was a lot like Dances With Wolves. (I have fond memories of my whole college film class ripping DWW to shreds after watching three hours worth of stereotypes and clichés.)
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Someone once described it to me as Ferngully in Space, and I don’t think they were wrong.
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Yes, far too many plot spoilers out there.
There is an interesting film to be made about how it came to hit the iceberg - plot spoiler; it really shouldn’t have done - especially with the revelation that the reason they were in such a hurry to reach NY, and by a northern route, may have been that there was a serious coal fire on board, not uncommon in those crude ships. But it wouldn’t be a very mass market film. In a way, it was a precursor of the Challenger disaster.
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Surely you realise that the entire USP of the Hollywood blockbuster is that the straight women and gay men want to sleep with fuck the male lead, and contrariwise the female lead? Ergo avoid blockbusters on early dates, or avoid the kind of women [or men] who confuse the movies with reality. I went for the latter, nearly 40 years on it seems to be working out OK.
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Haven’t heard about a coal fire before, but I do remember when I went to see the Titanic exhibit, the only pair of binoculars on display belonged to a passenger. The accompanying information card mentioned that although the crow’s nest binoculars were logged as being present and in good repair before the transatlantic leg of the voyage, they had disappeared by the night of the sinking.
Just one of those things that wouldn’t have been so bad except the night was very still, the ice was a little worse than usual for that time of year, and so on. Like a lot of disasters, it was a collection of small mistakes that led to the catastrophic one.
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Two things all James Cameron movies have in common are a paper-thin plot and painfully terrible dialogue.
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There is photographic evidence (burnt paint on one side). It was a big problem in coal fired ships (and in coal mines). When the RN went over to oil firing, the worries about the flammability of oil were answered that coal dust was considerably worse.
There is also the moderately convincing theory that there was a problem at the time with steam and sail crews, in that on sailing ships the helm goes the other way. There were known problems with “steam orders” and “sail orders” and there is some evidence that the order was given to steer away from the iceberg in good time - but in a confusion of orders between differently trained crew members the opportunity was lost.
We don’t learn; remember the near-disaster with the first Moon landing where the computer was overloaded because NASA thought that routines were needed to enable the astronauts to work in feet - even though they were perfectly familiar with SI?
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I’m basically a lowbrow, but I enjoyed Terminator 1 and 2, Aliens, and The Abyss, all written by Cameron. In line with this topic, I note that they all feature prominent female characters.
I haven’t seen Titanic - too much hype before I got around to it.
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Buzz Aldrin himself is on record as saying the issue was he was running two programs at once, but the computer could only handle one of the two he was running. Once he turned off the officially not-required one, the computer worked fine.
You might be thinking of Apollo 13, where the vendor used standard aircraft specs for voltage and not the actual specs being used by NASA. There was an Imperial/SI muckup more recently with an unmanned probe.
ETA: right, that was the Mars orbiter
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric/
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If you’d prefer to preserve your childhood fondness for those movies, do not, under any circumstances watch Avatar in HD rather than 3D. Everything craptacular about this movie, and his other movies jump right in your face.
I didn’t bother with Titanic, either. There was definitely too much hype, and it was billed as one of those sappy, romantic dramas. I really do not like those “chick flics,” never have.
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It was a multitasking system using core memory, as I recall. The point was that the programs were over complex due to unit conversion. (The architecture of those computers was remarkable and reminds me in some ways of a much simplified PIC).
I may be wrong but I remember distinctly being told this by someone who worked with NASA and directly with the astronauts.
Definitely not, I knew nothing about 13. But now I’ve read it up on Wikipedia. I am going to make a USist comment. My justification is my own one time membership of an IEC safety committee, and running an R&D department designing electrical safety devices. (I actually used to know one of the US delegates dealing with thermostats).
The root problem is likely to be that the US has had an extremely sloppy attitude to electrical safety - it has been left up to industry and the level of testing and approval of components expected in Europe just hasn’t been there. It doesn’t surprise me that Beech thought a switch rated at 28VDC would continue to work at 65, even though the reason 28V was chosen is because, basically, it doesn’t create arcs.
And why has there been a lax attitude to safety? Machismo, I think. We’re still seeing the recklessness in male-dominated occupations (which is what software development has become). Risk taking behaviour, in fact. When it was women who wrote the software - mainly in COBOL let it be added - things like banking programs were written which, with a Y2K hiccup, are in many cases still in use. The new “agile” methodology relies on rapid break/fix. Not the attitude you want in building spacecraft, but what you expect from a Silicon Valley where taking risks is seen as a route to promotion and the more cautious (and wider ranging) approach of women tends not to be valued.
German Sitzfleisch and the British Standards Institute preserved Northern Europe from the worst of it. Our switches, plugs and sockets are largely idiot proof.
And that’s enough rant.
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I can’t find a primary source saying that, just discussions on Reddit and blogs. The NASA history page doesn’t mention measurements at all, but does say that memory management was an issue:
https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch2-5.html
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